It was nearly six months ago when Samsung laid out their plan to manufacture an affordable, super-fast 256GB SSD by the end of the year. It sounded a little bit optimistic at the time, but as of today, they're here. Sort of. Samsung says that manufacturing has begun, but still hasn't let loose on the most important nugget: price. They have, however, elaborated a little bit on their claims of "disruptive" performance: the news SSDs will offer speed "analogous to having a 15,000rpm drive, without all of its size, noise, power and heating drawbacks." They also claim to have decreased the read/write speed gap to about 10% and dropped power consumption to a slight 1.1w. This all sounds great, it's cost that'll win the SSD war. [Akihabara]